Re: Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC

On 3/3/25 9:09 PM, John Levine wrote:

According to Brian G. Lucas <bagel99@gmail.com>:

That was not what customers were interested in.  There were various
Unix variants available for the PC, but the customers preferred using
DOS, which was preinstalled and did not cost extra. ...

>
Yup.  PC/IX was a really nice Unix port for the IBM PC and nobody was interested.
>

As this (the kernel part) was my project, it was very disappointing.  I think
IBM priced such that with DOS being "free", it had no chance.

 Nobody knew what the market for PC/IX was supposed to be beyond some
handwaving "if 5% if PC users buy it we'll be rich."  PC/IX could do
anything a PDP-11 running Unix could do, give or take peripherals,
but the PC market was very different from the PDP-11 market and by
that time the PDP-11 was rather long in the tooth.
 

Maybe everyting except for lack of memory protection.
IBM sold it as a single user system.